CULTURE WARS - Fascism

"Beta Testing Fascism: How Online Culture Wars Created the Alt-Right" by John Michael Colón, In These Times 6/27/2017

Angela Nagle's “Kill All Normies” charts the ideology's emergence from the internet's darkest corners.

Leftists who write think-pieces or satires about the alt-right tend to produce more sensationalism than substance.  Too often, satisfying but unhelpful insults like “anime Nazi dorks” and “neckbeard fedoras” stand in for analysis.

Rarely do we try to understand why someone who thinks of themself as a good person would want to join what amounts to the online youth wing of a global neofascist movement.  Yet many have—especially, yes, young white men—and the reactionary wave continues to spread.

By contrast, in "Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right," the Irish journalist Angela Nagle has made efforts not just to mock and condemn but to understand what's driving the alt-right's rise—and how the Left's worse tendencies help it grow.

The new book is an expansion of Nagle's reporting on the subject for American socialist magazines.  Building on work by anthropologist Gabriella Coleman and essayist David Auerbach, Nagle traces the alt-right's origins to the anonymous message boards, chat rooms, Wikis and blogs that dominated cyberspace through the mid-2000s and early 2010s, before today's public and interlinked social media accounts had reached their current level of dominance.  Defined by total anonymity, fleeting interactions and information overload, these spaces fostered a milieu of digital pranksterism and sophisticated in-jokes centered on two core interests: celebrating geek culture and transgressing moral boundaries

This culture was a mess of contradictions.  On the one hand, it was for a time a hotbed of principled leftist cyber-activism that culminated in endeavors such as the Anonymous movement and early Wikileaks.  Though their methods were controversial, these “hacktivists” were key to exposing much Obama-era corporate and government wrongdoing.  In April 2010, for example, Wikileaks released the Collateral Murder video of U.S. helicopters shooting a Reuters journalist and several civilians in Baghdad.  The next year, hackers revealed that Bank of America—with help from the Department of Justice—had assembled a team of shadowy intelligence contractors to coordinate a campaign of disinformation and hacking against journalists and activists.

As Nagle sees it, this radical element has faded away, undermined not only by state spying and repression but also by the inherent limits of its leaderless structure and ideological vagueness.

What's arisen in its place is something more toxic: a shallow online identity politics of both the Left and Right that Nagle calls “politics as culture war.”

The right-wing side grew out of forums like 4chan, where white and upper-middle-class teenagers, protected by screen names and driven by deep social alienation, could plot to ruin the lives of random strangers through harassment and the publication of personal information (known as doxxing) while cracking intentionally hyperbolic and supposedly ironic jokes on sexist, pedophiliac, anti-Semitic and racist themes.  In these web communities, it's intentionally ambiguous whether jokes like “Jews did 9/11” are supposed to be funny because they're absurd or because they're true.  This proves a fruitful ambiguity for actual racists, as it helps them normalize and spread their beliefs.

It was the 2014 “Gamergate” controversy, Nagle explains, that turned this largely apolitical “culture of transgression” into a far-right cultural movement.  When female video-game journalists such as Anita Sarkeesian took issue with sexism in the gaming world, offended male gamers unleashed a sustained campaign of harassment, doxxing, and rape and death threats against the critics.  Like-minded young men (and some women) took note.  Soon a decentralized coalition of rabid anti-feminists, white nationalists, “free-market” libertarians and even self-proclaimed monarchists had declared war on political correctness.  The shared culture they developed, Nagle writes, was “characterized by a particularly dark preoccupation with thwarted or failed white Western masculinity as a grand metaphor.”

This primordial stew of proto-fascism is what came to be called the alt-right.  After moving through its origins, Nagle spends the bulk of her book sketching its various component movements and their figureheads.

There's the Manosphere, whose diverse collection of misogynists is united in the belief that feminism has destroyed both the traditional family and their own sexual prospects.  There's Richard Spencer and his white nationalist brigade, who argue for the biological reality of race, the impossibility of a multicultural society, and the need for white ethnostates to defend the West from immigrants and Islam.  There are carnival barkers like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes and Lauren Southern who manufacture whole media careers by baiting over-earnest progressives into shrill and predictable denunciations.  And there's the whole sad parade of self-help gurus, conspiracy theorists and supplement-peddling hucksters—think InfoWars.com owner Alex Jones—who have found a way to make a quick buck and a name for themselves in the alt-right digital ecosystem.

It all has the feel of a whirlwind tour—which isn't always to the book's benefit.  Much of 'Kill All Normies' is a series of anecdotes that doesn't take the time to define its terms or give more than cursory summaries of its subjects.  Often these anecdotes are illuminating in themselves, but readers who aren't already familiar with the relevant subcultures and slang may struggle to keep up.  (This improves in the last three chapters and conclusion, which stand on their own as analytic essays.)

Nagle is at her best when she moves past the fleeting scandals and fads of digital culture and cuts to the psychological roots of this new far-right cultural politics—particularly its anti-feminist core.  With surprising sympathy, she outlines their “anxiety and anger about their low-ranking status” in the sexual hierarchy.  She quotes “men's rights activist” F. Roger Devlin, who argues that the freedom of women to choose sexual partners outside marriage and defy traditional gender roles has led to “promiscuity for the few” and “loneliness for the majority.”  Put bluntly, Devlin and his ilk believe women choose to hook up with elite men and leave the vast majority involuntarily celibate, or “incel.”  Whether or not this argument holds, those lonely outcasts who see themselves as the victims of this narrative express their resentment at sexual rejection not only through trolling online but also by opposing women's basic human rights and, in extreme cases, by committing sexually motivated murders as in the 2014 massacre near the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Nagle concludes, convincingly, that this is “the central issue driving this kind of reactionary sexual politics, perhaps even the central personal motivation behind the entire turn to the far Right among young men.”

But Nagle argues these ideas gained currency as part of an online culture war—and every war has more than one side.

The alt-right's mortal enemies came into their own at the microblogging service Tumblr, where other socially alienated teens constructed subcultures based around increasingly arcane racial, gender, sexual and other identities.  Nagle argues—and I agree—that this supposedly liberal movement retreated into symbolic politics and a profoundly illiberal culture of virtue signaling, grievance and social authoritarianism.

Drawing on the work of the late writer Mark Fisher, Nagle defines “Tumblr-liberalism” (her term, though I think this underestimates the tendency's reach into radical as well as liberal circles) by its intolerance of dissent: “The very idea of winning people over through ideas now seems to anguish, offend and enrage.”  Instead, those who would express something different from the party line must be harassed or even denied a platform entirely.

Nagle catalogs many damning instances of this tendency using public humiliation, censorship, harassment and firings in order to promote and enforce its dogmas, both online and off.  (In fact I'd argue the sheer breadth of her examples shows Tumblr liberalism is something that extends far beyond Tumblr and has deeper roots.)  In one case, an “antiracist” Twitter user responds to the death of a six-year-old attacked by an alligator by mocking the “white male entitlement” of his parents; in another, anonymous students bring the academic Laura Kipnis before a Title IX court simply for writing an essay arguing love affairs between professors and their students don't necessarily constitute an abuse of power.

The spread of “antifa” tactics among anarchists and liberals in the Trump era has seen no-platforming increasingly applied to the alt-right.  But Tumblr liberals, it seems, more often than not target others on the Left, denying a platform to those guilty of thought-crime against various sacred cows.  This trend continues, as evidenced by a recent scandal in which philosophers called on a feminist journal to retract an article that dared to engage seriously with the notion of Rachel Dolezal-style “transracialism.”

Nagle believes these Tumblr liberals have “made the Left a laughingstock for a whole new generation.”  Though nominally opposed, Nagle argues, the alt-right and Tumblr liberalism feed off each other and form “essentially two rival wings of contemporary identity politics.” In the new culture wars between these two groups, the alt-right is able to claim the mantle of free speech and countercultural transgression that leftists once proudly boasted to represent, so that the Tumblr liberals are positioned as a sort of morality police—prudish, inquisitorial, and widely despised.  This in turn has made being on the Right “something exciting, fun and courageous for the first time since … well, possibly ever.”

No doubt Nagle's assault on identity politics will spark many necessary and overdue debates on the Left.  Already this has been a key part of the book's controversial reception.  But what strikes me most is something else.

Though "Kill All Normies" is a fine piece of journalism and cultural criticism—the first serious popular study of its subject—I found as I read it that I kept coming up against the book's most important limitation.  Nagle has a tendency to see the alt-right as essentially a pop-cultural phenomenon or social malaise to be diagnosed, not a political movement with ideas that must be refuted.  As a result, the book leaves many urgent questions unanswered.  Does the alt-right constitute a twenty-first century fascism?  What kind of politics, ultimately, follows from their beliefs?  What connection do they have to the xenophobic nationalism currently sweeping electoral politics across the industrialized world?  Readers must look elsewhere for answers.

Furthermore, Nagle's focus on minor Twitter celebrities means she neglects the more serious intellectuals in the movement—whether it's the post-libertarian dreams of authoritarian city-states one finds in Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, the corporatist nationalism of Michael Anton, or the biological racism and white supremacy of Steve Sailer and Richard Spencer.  These writers make complicated arguments against democracy and for racial and sexual hierarchy rooted in historical analysis, evolutionary psychology, IQ testing and political theory.  Even when ordinary alt-righters can't recognize them by name, they are often regurgitating vulgarized versions of their ideas.

These ideas are refutable and the politics underlying them is horrific.  But every time the Left refuses to even try countering them with our own, the alt-right's portrait of us as dogmatists who can only confront their terrible truths with censorship and violence gains credibility.  (And that portrait, as we've seen, is a key component of how they recruit.)  Nagle would probably respond that the alt-right's insipid Internet lunacy reveals it to be fundamentally unserious and not worth engaging intellectually.  But today's revived socialist movement, of which Nagle and I are both a part, is no less a product of social alienation and postmodern irony than the new fascism, nor does it lack its own Twitter bullshit.  In a country that elected Trump, it's worth taking seriously the appeal of both movements as attempts to escape the dead end of neoliberalism—one by expanding democracy, the other by doing away with it.

Still, Nagle's book is a good start.  What we get from it is a brief history and a portrait of the cultural logic that may breed tomorrow's authoritarianism.  Hopefully it is the first contribution of many to that part of the antifascist struggle that employs means other than fists and makeshift shields.

MEDIA - A Killing OnLine

"A murder video posted online raises debate about Facebook's responsibility" PBS NewsHour 4/17/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  A video of a man being shot to death was posted on Facebook Sunday and stayed online for nearly three hours before it was taken down.  A man identified as Steve Stephens is said to have recorded himself confronting and killing Robert Godwin Sr. in Cleveland, raising questions about the role of social media sites.  John Yang talks to Emily Dreyfuss of Wired magazine.

JOHN YANG (NewsHour):  The 57-second video shows a man identified as Steve Stephens driving the streets of Cleveland while talking on the phone.  He then steps from the car and confronts Robert Godwin Sr., a 74-year-old retired foundry worker, a father of nine and a grandfather of 14, and shoots Godwin dead.

The online killing reportedly remained on the site for nearly three hours before Facebook removed it.

In a statement late today, the company said that the video has “no place on Facebook and goes against our policies and everything we stand for.”  The company said it's reviewing how it operates "to be sure people can report videos that violate our standards as quickly as possible.”

This episode raises fresh questions about the role and responsibility of social media sites like Facebook.

Before the latest statement, I spoke with Emily Dreyfuss, a senior staff writer at Wired magazine.

I began by asking her what Facebook could do.

EMILY DREYFUSS, Wired:  First of all, you know, it is true that Facebook is working very hard to keep videos like this off of its site.

It's easy in a moment like this to say, you know, this is absurd that it was on Facebook for even three hours.  But the fact is that a large apparatus of content moderation and work went into the effort to be able to even get the video down after three hours.  And in order for it to be removed, that means that people on Facebook had to flag it as inappropriate, and then that flag had to be sent to people that Facebook employs all over the world to get rid of content like this.

And they took it down.  And, sometimes, this can take up to 48 hours.  So, three hours here is not even long in the scheme of things.  Now, Facebook could do more.  And they are working hard to figure out what they can do.

One of those things would be to use A.I. and allow artificial intelligence to help humans who are having to flag this sort of terrible, gruesome material so that we don't see it.

One of the problems is that A.I. is not really necessarily ready and up to the task of that yet, so Facebook is still trying to figure out how to make this work.

COFFEE LOVERS - The Worlds Strongest Coffee

"Black Insomnia is the Strongest Coffee Ever, and It's Not For the Faint of Heart" by Bruce Brown, Digital Trends 3/31/2017

No, we're not getting a jump on April Fools' Day — this coffee could put you on the ground.  Black Insomnia Coffee is officially the strongest coffee in the world — strong enough to be dangerous, according to CNN.

How strong is Black Insomnia?  The dangerous brew, made from robusta beans, is almost three times stronger than Starbucks' dark roast and more than six times stronger than McDonald's coffee.  The International Food Information Council recommends a maximum 300mg of caffeine daily, while the FDA's limit is 400mg.  One 12-ounce cup of Black Insomnia has 702mg.  And that's enough to be harmful to many people.

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researcher Mary Sweeney said, speaking of Black Insomnia's caffeine content, “This makes it easier to consume more caffeine than you intend to and effects can range from mild to severe, for example, jitteriness, nervousness, restlessness, and trouble sleeping.  The most serious effect would be cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat).”

Newly retired coffee lover Sean Kristafor founded Black Insomnia in June 2016.  Kristafor's goal was to create the strongest coffee in the world.  To prove Black Insomnia deserved the title, the company had its coffee tested against other strong brands, with an eye on Death Wish coffee, the previous claimant.

According to Caffeine Informer, Death Wish coffee has 54.2mg of caffeine per fluid ounce — Black Insomnia scores 58.5mg.  By comparison, Starbucks dark roast has 21.25mg, Red Bull energy drink has 9.46mg, and Coca-Cola has 2.8mg.

At first, the brew was available only in cafés in Cape Town, South Africa.  Jump forward five months to October, and Kristafor had customers in 22 countries.  Now Black Insomnia is selling 5 to 6 tons of coffee each month.

“We're the leader in the strong coffee category and are not letting up anytime soon,” Death Wish customer service representative Calden Tuller told CNN.  “Our coffee is much different than the competition, due to the fact that our roast is USDA certified organic, and fair trade certified as well.”

Caffeine Informer's editor Ted Kallmyer places Black Insomnia on its list of the most dangerous caffeinated products.  Kallmyer said habitual coffee drinkers build up a tolerance over time so exceeding 400mg a day doesn't harm them.  “However, the problem with these products is that they can inadvertently be consumed by people who are not in the targeted category.”

Be wary out there if someone hands you a cup of coffee and says, “Be careful, it's strong.” They may not be kidding.

You can order online:  Black Insomnia Coffee Online

K-Cup USERS:  You can order "Disposable Cups for Use in Keurig Brewers (a kit)" from Simple Cups, that allows you to make K-Cups using ANY coffee.  (Amazon)

COUNTER TERRORISM - The Technology

"Can the high-tech hunt for terrorists stop lone wolf attacks?" PBS NewsHour 9/6/2016

NOVA - 15 Years of Terror

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Take a look at the room 9/11 built: The operations center at the National Counterterrorism Center aggregates data in hopes that analysts will be able to predict the next terrorist attack.  With the advent of “social media intelligence,” answers are everywhere, but the challenge is piecing them together.  Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.

MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour):  This is the room 9/11 built, the operations center at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) just outside Washington, D.C.

NICK RASMUSSEN, National Counterterrorism Center:  On a 24/7 basis, we have officers here working in shifts who are consuming, reading, analyzing, and assessing every bit of available information that there is to try to figure out what terrorist threats are aimed at the United States.

MILES O'BRIEN:  Nick Rasmussen is the director here.  The agency itself, and this room in particular, were created to encourage the myriad of intelligence, military and law enforcement organizations involved in national security to share classified information.

This is where they try to connect the dots.

NICK RASMUSSEN:  So, there are probably officers at NCTC from 17 or 18 different government organizations all across the government.  Basically, every three- or four-letter agency that you could probably name, we probably have somebody here at NCTC serving from that organization on a one- or two- or three-year assignment.

MILES O'BRIEN:  The nature of the work here has changed dramatically in recent years.

MAN:  These folks can get radicalized by one group and the baton can be passed to another group.

WOMAN:  The FBI had this man on its radar as early as 2013.

MILES O'BRIEN:  More lone wolves, fewer face-to-face meetings and phone calls, the Internet as a source of inspiration and planning.

MAN:  Self-radicalization doesn't have to take many months or many years.

NICK RASMUSSEN:  Increasingly, what connecting the dots means to me is dealing with the huge, huge volume of publicly available or open source or unclassified information that's out there that may have terrorism relevance.

And the work we're doing now with our partners in the intelligence community often doesn't involve really, really sensitive intelligence.  It involves looking at Twitter or looking at some other social media platform and trying to figure out who that individual behind that screen name, behind that handle might actually be and whether that person poses a threat to the United States.

"Why it’s so hard to fight extremist propaganda online" PBS NewsHour 9/7/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  How do you deter people from being seduced by messages of extremism on social media?  Science correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at some of the strategies, including videos that provide a counter-narrative to the Islamic State and a computer program that uses digital signatures to track the movement of images on the internet.

EDUCATION - In the Student Digital World

"Why digital education could be a double-edged sword" PBS NewsHour 4/5/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Public education is becoming increasingly digitized -- these days, schools can compile everything from a student’s grades to their eating habits in online profiles.  But while this technology facilitates personalized learning, it also puts student data at risk of being compromised and misused, and extra security could come at the expense of education.  John Tulenko of Education Week reports.

JOHN TULENKO (NewsHour):  Miami, Florida, is taking on one of public education’s oldest problems:  With so many students, how do you personalize instruction?  One answer is with computers.

At Miami’s iPrep Academy, one-size-fits-all lessons are a thing of the past.

NICOLE RASMUSON, iPrep Academy:  We all started at the very beginning, and then some just took off.

JOHN TULENKO:  Nicole Rasmuson teaches math, using innovative software.

NICOLE RASMUSON:  It’s about 70 percent online.  And it’s a smart program, and so it checks, are they understanding, are they answering questions correctly right away?  Are they struggling?  Is it taking them a long time to answer questions?  Do they keep making mistakes?

JOHN TULENKO:  All the while, the computer is crunching and storing data about the students and sending back customized lessons.

NICOLE RASMUSON:  It’ll ask them, what are your interests?  And so, in the word problems, it’ll — if one kid’s really interested in food, it’ll talk about cookies and that kind of stuff.  It’ll even ask them, what are your friends’ names?  And then it’ll put their friends’ names in the problems, too.

JOHN TULENKO:  All that gets uploaded, along with student schedules, grades, discipline records, homework and even e-mails, the makings of what some have called a digital profile, that privacy expert Joel Reidenberg fears could someday be used in unauthorized ways.

SUPREME COURT - Latest Rulings 6/1/2015

"Supreme Court rules on headscarf dress code discrimination, threatening speech online" PBS NewsHour 6/1/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The Supreme Court offered two decisions today.  The justices ruled in favor of a young Muslim woman who was rejected from working at Abercrombie & Fitch because she wears a hijab.  The court also overturned the conviction of a man who had posted threatening language against his ex-wife on Facebook.  Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss those cases.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  The often divided Supreme Court was mostly united today on two high-profile decisions, one involving workplace discrimination and the other about threats made online.

Jeffrey Brown has that story.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  Both cases ended in lopsided decisions from the high court.  In one, justices ruled in favor of a young Muslim woman who was rejected from working at the clothing store Abercrombie & Fitch because she wears a hijab, or headscarf.  In the other, the court overturned the conviction of a man who had posted threatening language against his ex-wife on Facebook.

With us now, as always, to discuss the cases is Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal.

Welcome back, Marcia.

Let’s start with the headscarf case.  Right?

MARCIA COYLE, The National Law Journal:  OK.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Remind us of the facts of this case.

MARCIA COYLE:  All right.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of Samantha Elauf, claiming that the company violated Title VII, our nation’s major job bias law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs and practices.

Ms. Elauf, as you said, had applied for a job in the company’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, store wearing the headscarf.  She didn’t say it was for religious reasons, but the hiring manager believed that was the case, sought guidance from a superior on whether that headscarf violated the company’s dress code, what it called the look policy.

MEDIA - Vital Arts vs OnLine Entertainment

"How do we keep arts vital in an age of online entertainment?" PBS NewsHour 3/25/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  When was the last time you went to the theater, or watched a modern dance concert?  Why are Americans less connected to the arts?  In his new book, “Curtains?  The Future of the Arts in America,” Michael Kaiser, a former chief of the Kennedy Center, American Ballet Theatre and others, considers what arts organizations can do to thrive and survive.  Kaiser discusses his book with Jeffrey Brown.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  Have you been to the theater lately, seen a modern dance concert?  Have your children?  Will those theater dance and other arts institutions survive?

The questions are at the heart of a new book with a question in its title, “Curtains?:  The Future of the Arts in America.”

Author Michael Kaiser has headed many arts organizations, including the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the American Ballet Theater and the Alvin Ailey dance troupe.  He now heads the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland.

And welcome to you.

What’s the — if I say, what’s the essential problem, is it economic, cultural?  What is it?  How do you sum it up?

MICHAEL KAISER, Author, “Curtains?:  The Future of the Arts in America”:  We have faced many challenges in the arts for many years, but more recently, so much entertainment and arts are available online or in movie theaters.  And they are becoming very important competitors to those who present live performances in their theaters.

ILLEGAL DRUGS - On the 'Silk Road'

"Feds bust online illegal drug market and its 'Pirate' proprietor" PBS Newshour 10/2/2013

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Now to a very different kind of shutdown of a massive anonymous online marketplace for illegal drugs.

Ray Suarez has the story.

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour):  Federal authorities closed down a Web site known as Silk Road today and arrested its alleged mastermind, Ross Ulbricht of San Francisco, said to have called himself Dread Pirate Roberts.

Independent Television News investigated the world of online drug sales recently.

We begin with this account from correspondent Cordelia Lynch.

CORDELIA LYNCH:  We decided to see just how easy it is to buy drugs on a site called Silk Road.

Well, on here, I can see everything from heroin, crack, ecstasy pills.  The heroin here goes from 225 U.S. dollars up to $5,000.  You can even rate people.  This is a system based on trust.  Here, the seller says two grams of the best Afghan brown heroin.  Satisfaction guaranteed, it promises.

We bought three-and-a-half grams of MDMA, a key ingredient in ecstasy, and one gram of opium.  Well, the envelopes have arrived.  It took just three days and now we're going to find out what's inside.  We're at a government-licensed laboratory, and they're going to test the contents for us.

John Ramsey is a toxicologist who spent nearly three decades analyzing drugs for the police.

JOHN RAMSEY, toxicologist:  So we have gotten an almost perfect match for crystal MDMA.

CORDELIA LYNCH:  Next, he tested the opium we ordered.

JOHN RAMSEY:  So we have got one small package which could be opium.

CORDELIA LYNCH:  It, too, tested positive.

Are you surprised that these things are so readily available on the Internet?

JOHN RAMSEY:  Well, yes, I am.  We know there's a ready market in legal highs, but these are illegal compounds, and I'm surprised that it's relatively straightforward to buy them across -- over the Internet.

"Silk Road used 'anonymity layers,' digital currency to sell drugs in plain sight" PBS Newshour 10/2/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Unlike other online commerce businesses, Silk Road offered sales of illegal drugs, fake IDs, and even hitmen.  How were buyers and sellers able to remain anonymous?  Ray Suarez talks to Glenn Chapman of Agence France-Presse about how this widely known online drug market was able to evade law enforcement for so long.

EDUCATION - Colleges Adapting Online Courses

"Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden" by TAMAR LEWIN, New York Times 4/29/2013

Excerpt

Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education, giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.

Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes.  That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.

Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate.  In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.

To address both problems and keep students on track to graduation, universities are beginning to experiment with adding the new “massive open online courses,” created to deliver elite college instruction to anyone with an Internet connection, to their offerings.

While the courses, known as MOOCs, have enrolled millions of students around the world, most who enroll never start a single assignment, and very few complete the courses.  So to reach students who are not ready for college-level work, or struggling with introductory courses, universities are beginning to add extra supports to the online materials, in hopes of improving success rates.

Here at San Jose State, for example, two pilot programs weave material from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to earn credit for them.

“We’re in Silicon Valley, we breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it makes sense that we are the first university to try this,” said Mohammad Qayoumi, the university’s president.  “In academia, people are scared to fail, but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of failure.  And if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll figure out what went wrong and do better.”

In one pilot program, the university is working with Udacity, a company co-founded by a Stanford professor, to see whether round-the-clock online mentors, hired and trained by the company, can help more students make their way through three fully online basic math courses.

The tiny for-credit pilot courses, open to both San Jose State students and local high school and community college students, began in January, so it is too early to draw any conclusions.  But early signs are promising, so this summer, Udacity and San Jose State are expanding those classes to 1,000 students, and adding new courses in psychology and computer programming, with tuition of only $150 a course.

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers.  Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans.  So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.’s online materials with live classroom sessions might help more students succeed.  Dr. Agarwal, the president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer the blended class last fall.

The results were striking; 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.

NOTE:  I am using Coursera MOOC, a free online college level courses site, just to expand my knowledge.  They do not offer degrees at this time, but are looking for a way to do so but likely for a fee.

BOSTON - Mining Tsarnaev Brothers' Online History

"Mining Online History for What May Have Radicalized, Informed Tsarnaev Brothers" PBS Newshour 4/24/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In Boston, a memorial service honored a police officer killed during the manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers, while new information was released about the bombing suspects.  Judy Woodruff talks with Jerrold M. Post of the George Washington University and Jessica Stern of Harvard University about how people turn to radical violence.

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Meanwhile, the scene of the Boston Marathon attack, Boylston Street, reopened to the public.

And in the investigation, the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. officials who said the bombs were triggered by rudimentary remote controls.  Some of the gunpowder in the devices may have come from this store in New Hampshire, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev bought $400 dollars worth of fireworks in February.

WOMAN:  He just wanted the biggest, loudest stuff that we have in the store, pretty much.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  The surviving Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar, has reportedly told investigators that the brothers learned to make the pressure cooker bombs from an online magazine called Inspire.  It's published by al-Qaida's affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula and includes a section called "Open Source Jihad" that explains bomb-making techniques.

The ideology that apparently sparked the attack remained on display on Tamerlan Tsarnaev's YouTube page, links to videos from, among others, an Islamist fighter in the North Caucasus.

This afternoon, The Washington Post reported that the CIA asked to place Tamerlan Tsarnaev's name on a watch list more than a year before the attacks.  It wasn't immediately clear when his name was added to the list.  But The Post said it happened after the FBI closed its initial inquiry.

For more on what may have turned two young men into violent terrorists, I'm joined now by Dr. Jerrold Post, who had a 21-year career at the CIA, where he founded the Center for Analysis of Personal and Political Behavior.  He's now a professor of psychiatry, political psychiatry and international affairs at George Washington University.  And Jessica Stern, who is a lecturer at Harvard and former National Security Council staffer who's interviewed dozens of terrorists to try to understand what motivates them.

Significant excerpts

JERROLD POST, The George Washington University:  And there are three, and this coincides with what Jessica said earlier.  First, we are the victims.  Secondly, they, the West, and especially United States and Great Britain, but also Israel, are the victimizers, and therefore defensive jihad is justified and required against those who are doing this to us.

And that's a powerful message.  And you have people who have -- the brothers were characterized as losers by their uncle, who are not doing so well in their lives, and that he had given -- had lost his dream to be an Olympic boxer, that his parents had left and were back in Dagestan.  All of these together may have helped move him into this sphere where -- from passivity and helplessness to activity to aggression.


JUDY WOODRUFF:  And what about the -- staying with you, Jessica Stern, just a moment, what about the ideological or the religious, Islamist strain of this?  I mean, for example, are there passages from the Koran?  Or is it extreme language that veers off in another direction?

JESSICA STERN, Harvard University:  Well, what we have found is that it's often people who are most ignorant about Islam who can pick and choose passages, actually, from any religion that would seem to support a holy war.

And right now there's a canned ideology, a jihadi ideology that seems to be very appealing to the kind of alienated and lonely and lost young men that Jerry Post is talking about, that canned jihadi ideology right there.  Some of them are converts.

Watch Mining Online History for What May Have Radicalized Brothers on PBS.

See more from PBS NewsHour.

MEDIA - Online Television Service Poses Challenge to Traditional Networks

"Online Streaming Television Service Aereo Tests Traditional Broadcast Networks" PBS Newshour 4/12/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Internet television service Aereo uses free signals from local stations and streams content online for a small fee.  But several traditional broadcast companies, including PBS, Fox and CBS, have sued Aereo over copyright violations.  Hari Sreenivasan discusses the details with The Washington Post's Cecilia Kang.

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Now we look at new efforts to bring television online in a way that could alter the broadcast landscape.

It's about a company called Aereo, which picks up free signals from local TV stations and streams them for a small fee.  Some broadcasters, including FOX, Univision, NBC-Universal, CBS, and PBS sued, accusing Aereo of copyright violations.  A federal court of appeals recently ruled that Aereo could provide network shows.

This week, FOX and Univision fired a warning shot in response, suggesting that they may one day provide television programming only through cable.

EDUCATION - Effects of Free Online Courses

"How Free Online Courses Are Changing the Traditional Liberal Arts Education" PBS Newshour 1/8/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY: As tuition costs continue to rise, it seems counter-intuitive that professors at top universities would give away their courses for free. But that's exactly what they're doing, on web-based platforms known as "Massive Open Online Courses." Spencer Michels reports on how a boom in online learning could change higher education.

Coursera - Free OnLine Courses

EDUCATION - Massive Open Online Courses aka 'MOOCs'

"College of Future Could Be Come One, Come All" by TAMAR LEWIN, New York Times 11/19/2012

Excerpt

Teaching Introduction to Sociology is almost second nature to Mitchell Duneier, a professor at Princeton: he has taught it 30 times, and a textbook he co-wrote is in its eighth edition. But last summer, as he transformed the class into a free online course, he had to grapple with some brand-new questions: Where should he focus his gaze while a camera recorded the lectures? How could the 40,000 students who enrolled online share their ideas? And how would he know what they were learning?

In many ways, the arc of Professor Duneier’s evolution, from professor in a lecture hall to online instructor of tens of thousands, reflects a larger movement, one with the potential to transform higher education. Already, a handful of companies are offering elite college-level instruction — once available to only a select few, on campus, at great cost — free, to anyone with an Internet connection.

Moreover, these massive open online courses, or MOOCs, harness the power of their huge enrollments to teach in new ways, applying crowd-sourcing technology to discussion forums and grading and enabling professors to use online lectures and reserve on-campus class time for interaction with students.

The spread of MOOCs is likely to have wide fallout. Lower-tier colleges, already facing resistance over high tuition, may have trouble convincing students that their courses are worth the price. And some experts voice reservations about how online learning can be assessed and warn of the potential for cheating.

MOOCs first landed in the spotlight last year, when Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor, offered a free artificial-intelligence course, attracting 160,000 students in 190 nations. The resulting storm of publicity galvanized elite research universities across the country to begin to open higher education to everyone — with the hope of perhaps, eventually, making money doing so.

The expansion has been dizzying. Millions of students are now enrolled in hundreds of online courses, including those offered by Udacity, Mr. Thrun’s spinoff company; edX, a joint venture of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Coursera, a Stanford spinoff that is offering Professor Duneier’s course and 200 others.

No one knows just how these massive courses will evolve, but their appeal to a broad audience is unquestioned: retirees in Indiana see them as a route to lifelong learning, students in India as their only lifeline to college-level work.

EDUCATION - OnLine Charter Schools?

"Online Public Schools Gain Popularity, but Quality Questions Persist"
PBS Newshour 2/23/2012

EDUCATION - Learning Online Debate

"More Pupils Are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality" by TRIP GABRIEL, New York Times 4/5/2011

Excerpt

Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Mr. Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher.

Mr. Hamilton, 18, is among the expanding ranks of students in kindergarten through grade 12 — more than one million in the United States, by one estimate — taking online courses.

Advocates of such courses say they allow schools to offer not only makeup courses, the fastest growing area, but also a richer menu of electives and Advanced Placement classes when there are not enough students to fill a classroom.

But critics say online education is really driven by a desire to spend less on teachers and buildings, especially as state and local budget crises force deep cuts to education. They note that there is no sound research showing that online courses at the K-12 level are comparable to face-to-face learning.

Here in Memphis, in one of the most ambitious online programs of its kind, every student must take an online course to graduate, beginning with current sophomores. Some study online versions of courses taught in classrooms in the same building. Officials for Memphis City Schools say they want to give students skills they will need in college, where online courses are increasingly common, and in the 21st-century workplace.

But it is also true that Memphis is spending only $164 for each student in an online course. Administrators say they have never calculated an apples-to-apples comparison for the cost of online vs. in-person education, but around the country skeptics say online courses are a stealthy way to cut corners.

“It’s a cheap education, not because it benefits the students,” said Karen Aronowitz, president of the teachers’ union in Miami, where 7,000 high school students were assigned to study online in computer labs this year because there were not enough teachers to comply with state class-size caps.

“This is being proposed for even your youngest students,” Ms. Aronowitz said. “Because it’s good for the kids? No. This is all about cheap.”

In Idaho, the state superintendent of education plans to push a requirement that high-school students take four or more online courses, following a bill that passed the Legislature last week to provide every student with a laptop, paid for from a state fund for educators’ salaries.

Chicago and New York City have introduced pilot online learning programs. In New York, Innovation Zone, or iZone, includes online makeup and Advanced Placement courses at 30 high schools, as well as personalized after-school computer drills in math and English for elementary students.

First, I too wonder if online-courses are good for K-12 education. Having said that, this MAY be a good idea as a supplement or homework.

K-12 education is more than just teaching subjects; it also includes socialization with other students, cultures, and ethnic groups.

Also, public education needs to take into account, IF the online course is taken off-campus, the the person at the keyboard is actually the student and not a ringer while the intended student is off playing "hooky."

Second, for higher education; the real problem with online courses, is PRIVATE "diploma mills" that run online courses as a way to make money. Especially those to hire salesmen to hunt up students eligible for government education funding.

The most reliable computer courses are run by accredited colleges and universities, where the courses are run by the professors. They may include live online video streaming of a class as it is held at the collage. The best even provide online interaction with professors via eMail or chat. They may include a requirement to occasional actually attend a class in person, and the online portion is a supplement.

This could be a model that K-12 education could follow fore grades that use course-based education (Math class, English class, U.S. History class, etc.). Online courses WITH video of actual classes, but attended from home WITH interaction with teachers via eMail or chat. But this model SHOULD include a requirement to occasionally visit the school and teacher for face-to-face evaluation.